Welcome to WSDL
Welcome to the world of WSDL, the Web Services Definition Language. WSDL was designed by IBM, Microsoft, and Ariba to provide a standard mechanism to describe Web services. It was then submitted to the W3C for standardization. The need for this definition is akin to the need for distributed systems to define an IDL (Interface Definition Language).
As you have been reading until now, finding Web services can be as simple as thumbing through the yellow pages. After you've found a service, though, what do you do with it? You could call up the provider of the Web service and ask for the names of all its services and what SOAP messages you need to invoke them. This would obviously be rather inefficient and would really stymie your ...
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